[maxbond]

This is true of all abstractions; if you don't need them, then they'll make your program more complex and more painful to write and maintain.

Exercising judgement about when to use or shirk an abstraction is a lot of what being a software engineer is about.

[eternityforest]

When does async/await ever make your program harder to maintain? Maybe to people who don't already know it, but almost all the big languages have async, it would be hard for a programmer to get away with not learning it, at least if they're a python of JS programmer.

It adds complexity, but it's at the level where you don't have to think about it. If you're doing something advanced enough to where async is a leaky abstraction, you're probably doing something big enough to where you would want the advantages it offers.

If you're doing something simple, async is just a black box primitive that is pretty easy to use.